Tag: Cloud

Streamlining AWS Cloud Spend for Innovation Investments

Cloud Spend 101: What is it, and why does it matter?

Cloud spend is the amount of money an organization spends in AWS and across all cloud platforms. A common belief is that moving to the cloud will significantly decrease your total cost of ownership (TCO) quickly, easily, and almost by default. Unfortunately, reaping the infrastructure cost savings of AWS is not that simple, but it certainly is obtainable. To achieve a lower TCO while simultaneously boosting productivity and gaining operational resilience, business agility, and sustainability, you must strategize your migration and growth within AWS.

The most common mistake made when migrating from on-prem environments to the cloud is going “like-for-like.” Basically, creating a cookie-cutter image of what existed on-prem in the new cloud environment. Because they are two completely different types of infrastructure, organizations end up way over-provisioned using unnecessary and expensive On-Demand Instance pricing.

Ideally, you want a well-developed game plan before migration starts to avoid losing money in the cloud. With the advice and support of a trusted cloud partner, a comprehensive strategy takes your organization from design to implementation to optimization. That puts you in the best position to stay on top of costs during every step of migration and once you’re established in AWS. Cost savings realized in the cloud can be reinvested in innovation that expands business value and grows your bottom line.

The 6 pillars of cloud spend optimization.

While it’s best to have a comprehensive strategy before migrating to the cloud, cloud spend optimization is an ongoing necessity in any cloud environment. With hundreds of thousands of different options for cloud services today, choosing the right tools is overwhelming and leaves much room for missteps. At the same time, there are also a lot of opportunities available. Regardless of where you are in your cloud journey, the six pillars of cloud spend optimization provide a framework for targeted interventions.

#1: Reserved Instances (RIs)

RIs deliver meaningful savings on Amazon EC2 costs compared to On-demand Instance pricing. RIs aren’t physical instances but a billing discount for using On-Demand Instances in your account. Pricing is based on the instance type, region, tenancy, and platform; term commitment; payment cadence; and offering class.

#2: Auto-Parking

A significant benefit of the cloud is scalability, but the other side of that is individual control. Often, an organization’s team members forget or are not prompted or incentivized to terminate resources when they aren’t being used. Auto-Parking schedules and automates the spin-up/spin-down process depending on hours of use to prevent paying for idle resources. This is an especially helpful tool for development and test environments.

#3: Right-Sizing

Making sure you have exactly what you need and nothing you don’t requires an analysis of resource consumption, chargebacks, auto-parked resources, and available RIs. Using those insights, organizations can implement policies and guardrails to reduce overprovisioning by tagging resources for department-level chargebacks and properly monitoring CPU, memory, and I/O (input/output).

#4: Family Refresh

Instance types, VM series, and Instance Families all describe the methods cloud providers use to package instances depending on the hardware. When instance types are retired and replaced with new technology, cloud pricing changes based on compute memory and storage parameters – this process is referred to as “Family Refresh.” Organizations must closely monitor instances and expected costs to manage these price fluctuations and prevent redundancies.

#5: Waste

Inherent in optimization is waste reduction. You need the checks and balances we’ve discussed to prevent unnecessary costs and reap the financial benefits of a cloud environment. Identifying waste and stopping the leaks takes time and regular, accurate reporting within each business unit. For example, when developers are testing, make sure they’re only spinning up new environments for a specific purpose. Once those environments are no longer used, they should be decamped to avoid waste.

#6: Storage

Storage catalyzes many organizations to move to the cloud because it’s a valuable way to reduce on-prem hardware spend. Again, to realize those savings, businesses must keep a watchful eye on what is being stored, why it’s being stored, and how much it will cost. There are typically four components impacting storage costs:

  1. Size – How much storage do you need?
  2. Data transfer (bandwidth) – How often does data move from one location to another?
  3. Retrieval time – How quickly do you need to access the data?
  4. Retrieval requests – How often do you need access to the data?

Depending on your answers to these questions, there are different ways to manage your environment using file storage, databases, data backup, and data archives. Organizations can estimate storage costs with a solid data lifecycle policy while right sizing and amplifying storage capacity and bandwidth.

Private Pricing Agreements

Another way to control your AWS spend is with a PPA or a Private Pricing Agreement – formally known as an EDP or Enterprise Discount Program. A PPA is a business-led pricing agreement with AWS that considers a specific term and commit amount. Organizations that are already in the cloud and love the service can use their expected growth over the next three or five years to get a discount for committing to that amount of time with AWS. In addition to expected compute services, reservations for reserved instances, and existing savings plans, the business also includes software purchases from the marketplace in the agreement to get further discounts.

Choosing a cloud optimization partner.

It’s easy to know what to do to control spend, but it’s a whole other beast to integrate cloud optimization into business initiatives and the culture of both IT teams and finance teams. Of course, you can go it alone if you have the internal cloud expertise required for optimization, but most businesses partner with an external cloud expert to avoid the expenses, risk, and time needed to see results. Attempting these strategies without an experienced partner can cost you more in the long run without achieving the ROI you expected.

In fact, when going it alone, businesses gain about 18% savings on average. While that may sound satisfying, companies that partner with the cloud experts at 2nd Watch average 40% savings on their compute expenses alone. How? We aim high, and so should you. Regardless of how you or your cloud optimization partner tackles cloud spend, target 90% or greater coverage in reserved instances and savings plans. In addition to the six pillars of optimization and PPAs, you or your partner also need to…

  • Know how to pick the right services and products for your business from the hundreds of thousands of options available.
  • Develop a comprehensive cloud strategy that goes beyond just optimizing cost.
  • Assess the overall infrastructure footprint to determine the effectiveness of serverless or containerization for higher efficiency.
  • Evaluate applications running on EC2 instances to identify opportunities for application modernization.

Take the next step in your cloud journey.

2nd Watch is a great choice for cloud spend optimization with AWS because we specialize in this area. With our extensive experience and in-depth knowledge of AWS services and pricing models, we can help you maximize your AWS investments. Our comprehensive solutions include cost analysis, budgeting, forecasting, and ongoing monitoring. We have a proven track record of delivering significant cost savings for our clients across various industries.

We leverage automation and advanced tools to identify cost-saving opportunities, eliminate waste, and optimize your AWS resources. This ensures efficiency and allows you to focus on innovation and growth. We provide continuous optimization and support, proactively identifying potential cost-saving measures and recommending adjustments based on your changing business needs.

With us, you’ll gain transparency into your AWS spend through detailed reports and analytics. This visibility empowers you to make informed decisions and manage your budgets effectively. Choose 2nd Watch for cloud spend optimization with AWS and experience the expertise, solutions, and track record that will help you achieve cost savings while driving innovation and growth.

2nd Watch saves organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars in the cloud every year, and we’d love to help you reallocate your cloud spend toward business innovation. Our experienced cloud experts work with your team to teach cloud optimization strategies that can be carried out independently in the future. As an AWS Premier Partner with 10 years of experience, 2nd Watch advisors know how to maximize your environment within budget so you can grow your business. Contact Us to learn more and get started!

 

 

 

 

 

 


Cloud Economics: Empowering Organizations for Success

Cloud economics is crucial for an organization to make the most out of their cloud solutions, and business leaders need to prioritize shifting their company culture to embrace accountability and trackability.

When leaders hear the phrase “cloud economics,” they think about budgeting and controlling costs. Cost management is an element of cloud economics, but it is not the entire equation. In order for cloud economics to be implemented in a beneficial way, organizations must realize that cloud economics is not a budgetary practice, but rather an organizational culture shift.

The very definition of “economics” indicates that the study is more than just a numbers game. Economics is “a science concerned with the process or system by which goods and services are produced, sold, and bought.” The practice of economics involves a whole “process or system” where actors and actions are considered and accounted for. 

With this definition in mind, cloud economics means that companies are required to look at key players and behaviors when evaluating their cloud environment in order to maximize the business value of their cloud. 

Once an organization has fully embraced the study of cloud economics, it will be able to gain insight into which departments are utilizing the cloud, what applications and workloads are utilizing the cloud, and how all of these moving parts contribute to greater business goals. Embodying transparency and trackability enables teams to work together in a harmonious way to control their cloud infrastructure and prove the true business benefits of the cloud. 

If business leaders want to apply cloud economics to their organizations, they must go beyond calculating cloud costs. They will need to promote a culture of cross-functional collaboration and honest accountability. Leadership should prioritize and facilitate the joint efforts of cloud architects, cloud operations, developers, and the sourcing team. 

Cloud economics will encourage communication, collaboration, and change in culture, which will have the added benefit of cloud cost management and cloud business success. 

Where do companies lose control of their cloud costs?

When companies lose control of cloud costs, the business value of the cloud disappears as well. If the cloud is overspending and there is no business value to show for, how are leaders supposed to feel good about their cloud infrastructure? Going over budget with no benefits would not be a sound business case for any enterprise in any industry. 

Out-of-control cloud spending is quite easy, and it usually boils down to poor business decisions that come from leadership. Company leaders should first recognize that they wield the power to manage cloud costs and foster communication between teams. If they are making poor business decisions, like prioritizing speedy delivery over well-written code or not promoting transparency, then they are allowing practices that negatively impact cloud costs. 

When leaders push their teams to be fast rather than thorough, it creates technical debt and tension between teams. The following sub-optimal practices can happen when leadership is not prioritizing cloud cost optimizations:

  • Developers ignore seemingly small administrative tasks that are actually immensely important and consequential, like rightsizing infrastructure or turning off inactive applications. 
  • Architects select suboptimal designs that are easier and faster to run but are more expensive to implement.
  • Developers use inefficient code and crude algorithms in order to ship a feature faster, but then fail to consider performance optimizations to execute less resource consumption.
  • Developers forgo deployment automation that would help to automatically rightsize.
  • Developers build code that isn’t inherently cloud-native, and therefore not cloud-optimized.
  • Finance and procurement teams are only looking at the bottom line and don’t fully understand why the cloud bill is so high, therefore, creating tension between IT/dev and finance/procurement. 

When these actions compound, it leads to an infrastructure mess that is incredibly difficult to clean up. Poorly implemented bad designs that are not easily scalable will require a significant amount of development time; therefore, leaving companies with inefficient cloud infrastructure and preposterously high cloud costs.

Furthermore, these high and unexplained cloud bills cause rifts between teams and are detrimental to collaboration efforts. Lack of accountability and visibility causes developer and finance teams to have misaligned business objectives. 

Poor cloud governance and culture are derived from leadership’s misguided business decisions and muddled planning. If leaders don’t prioritize cloud cost optimization through cloud economics, the business value of the cloud is diminished, and company collaboration will suffer. Developers and architects will continue to execute processes that create high cloud costs, and finance and procurement teams will forever be at odds with the IT team.

What are the benefits of cloud economics?

Below are a few common business pitfalls that leaders can easily address if they embrace the practice of cloud economics:

  1. Cost Savings: The cloud eliminates the need for upfront hardware investments and reduces ongoing maintenance and operational costs. Organizations only pay for the resources they use, allowing for cost optimization and scalability.
  2. Infrastructure Efficiency: Cloud providers can achieve economies of scale by consolidating resources and optimizing data center operations. This results in higher infrastructure efficiency, reducing costs for businesses compared to managing their own on-premises infrastructure.
  3. Agility and Speed: The cloud enables rapid deployment and provisioning of resources, reducing the time and cost associated with traditional IT infrastructure setup. This agility allows businesses to quickly adapt to changing market demands and launch new products or services faster.
  4. Global Reach and Accessibility: Cloud services provide a global infrastructure footprint, allowing businesses to easily expand their operations into new regions without the need for physical infrastructure investments. This global reach enables faster access to customers and markets.
  5. Scalability and Elasticity: Cloud services offer the ability to scale resources up or down based on demand. This scalability eliminates the need for overprovisioning and ensures businesses have the necessary resources to handle peak workloads without incurring additional costs during idle periods.
  6. Improved Resource Utilization: Cloud providers optimize resource utilization through virtualization and efficient resource management techniques. This leads to higher resource utilization rates, reducing wasted capacity and maximizing cost efficiency.
  7. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: Cloud services provide built-in redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities, reducing the need for costly backup infrastructure and complex recovery plans. This improves business continuity while minimizing the financial impact of potential disruptions.
  8. Innovation and Competitive Edge: The cloud enables rapid experimentation and innovation, allowing businesses to quickly test and launch new products or services. This agility gives organizations a competitive edge in the market, driving revenue growth and differentiation.
  9. Focus on Core Business: By offloading infrastructure management to cloud providers, businesses can focus more on their core competencies and strategic initiatives. This shift in focus improves productivity and resource allocation, leading to better economic outcomes.
  10. Decentralized Costs and Budgets: Knowing budgets may seem obvious, but more often than not, leaders don’t even know what they are spending on the cloud. This is usually due to siloed department budgets and a lack of disclosure. Cloud economics requires leaders to create visibility into their cloud spend and open channels of communication about allocation, budgeting, and forecasting.
  11. Lack of Planning and Unanticipated Usage: If organizations don’t plan, then they will end up over-utilizing the cloud. Failing to forecast or proactively budget cloud resources will lead to using too many unnecessary and/or unused resources. With cloud economics, leaders are responsible for strategies, systems, and internal communications to connect cloud costs with business goals.
  12. Non-Committal Mindset: This issue is a culmination of other problems. If business leaders are unsure of what they are doing in the cloud, they are less willing to commit to long-term cloud contracts. Unwillingness to commit to contracts is a missed opportunity for business leaders because long-term engagements are more cost-friendly. Once leaders have implemented cloud economics to inspire confidence in their cloud infrastructure, they can assertively evaluate purchasing options in the most cost-effective way.

What are the steps to creating a culture around cloud economics?

Cloud economics is a study that goes beyond calculating and cutting costs. It is a company culture that is a cross-functional effort. Though it seems like a significant undertaking, the steps to get started are quite manageable. Below is a high-level plan that business leaders must take charge of to create a culture around prioritizing cloud economics:

1. Inform: Stage one consists of lots of data collecting and understanding of the current cloud situation. Company leaders will need to know what the trust costs of the cloud are before they can proceed forward. Creating visibility around the current state is also the first step to creating a culture of communication and transparency amongst teams and stakeholders.

2. Optimize: Once the baseline is understood, leadership can analyze the data in order to optimize cloud costs. The visibility of the current state is crucial for teams and leadership to understand what they are working with and how they can optimize it. This stage is where a lot of conversations happen amongst teams to come up with an optimization action plan. It requires teams and stakeholders to communicate and work together, which ultimately builds trust among each other.

3. Operate: Finally, the data analysis and learnings can be implemented. With the optimization action plan, leaders should know what areas of the cloud demand optimization first and how to optimize these areas. At this point in the process, teams and stakeholders are comfortable with cross-collaboration and honest communications amongst each other. This opens up a transparent feedback loop that is necessary for continuous improvement. 

Conclusion

The entire organization stands to gain when cloud economics is prioritized. A cost-efficient cloud infrastructure will lead to improved productivity, cross-functional collaboration between teams, and focused efforts towards greater business objectives. 

Ready to take control of your cloud costs and maximize the value of your cloud infrastructure? Contact 2nd Watch today and let our team of experts help you implement cloud economics within your organization. As a trusted partner for enterprise-level services and support, we have the expertise to assist you in planning, analyzing, and recommending strategies to optimize your cloud costs and drive business objectives. Don’t let cloud spending go unchecked. Take charge of your cloud economics by reaching out to a 2nd Watch cloud expert now

Mary Fellows | Director of Cloud Economics at 2ND Watch


Why You Need AWS Consulting Services for Your Digital Transformation 

Organizations are looking to leverage the power of cloud computing to create new digital business models and drive operational efficiency. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the leading cloud computing platforms that help companies become more agile and cost-efficient to deliver on business objectives and priorities. As companies embrace cloud adoption for more reliable, cost-effective, and secure storage solutions, investing in AWS consultants has become a crucial part of the process.

AWS cloud services provide a tremendous opportunity for business development and growth, especially when combined with a reputable cloud consultant. AWS cloud computing allows organizations to safely and securely store vast amounts of data while ingesting and processing that data to make it actionable. It also enables IT teams to increase scalability and capability quickly and efficiently, so businesses can stay ahead of their competition. 

A cloud consultant experienced in working with AWS cloud technology can ensure that cloud strategies align with organizational needs, providing tailored solutions for maximum innovation and profit potential. By utilizing cloud computing consulting services from AWS, businesses can leverage cutting-edge cloud solutions to drive competitive advantage.

Working with AWS consultants like 2nd Watch can help your organization harness the technology that AWS offers, modernizing your business operations and transforming your IT infrastructure to solve your business challenges and hit critical business goals. 

What is AWS Consulting?

AWS consulting services offer businesses a range of solutions and expertise to facilitate your organization’s success with cloud migration and in-cloud processes. These services include advising on best practices, migrating existing applications, building new applications, and optimizing overall performance. AWS consultants are highly experienced professionals who have a deep understanding of the AWS platform and provide invaluable insights into how it can be used within an organization to support digital transformation. 

The value of working with these experts is that they understand the complexities of managing AWS’s infrastructure, cloud-native solutions, database services, and developer tools. AWS consultants analyze an organization’s existing setup and recommend practices for improved efficiency, scalability, security, cost optimization, reliability, and other aspects of their cloud environment. For example, they can help to ensure that an organization’s environment is properly configured and securely managed, so data remains safe and accessible to users. They can also provide expert guidance on which additional resources may be needed for more robust performance. 

The Benefits of Working With an AWS Consultant 

The main goal of any AWS consultant is to help businesses make the most of their investments in AWS products and services. This includes helping them choose appropriate services (such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, or Amazon RDS,) providing advice on configuring their environment correctly, ensuring their applications run efficiently in the cloud, and optimizing costs by scaling up or down resources as needed. Moreover, AWS consultants can help set up automated processes, such as deploying new versions of software or monitoring performance metrics. Most importantly, they can also offer advice on security best practices when working with sensitive information in the cloud.  

By taking advantage of an experienced AWS consulting team, businesses can benefit from numerous advantages, including reduced costs, improved performance, scalability, and flexibility. With a tailored approach, organizations can positively impact their bottom line by leveraging the right combination of services and resources offered by AWS, such as compute power, storage capacity, database solutions, content delivery networks (CDNs), analytics tools, and machine learning capabilities, among others.

Working with an AWS consultant will improve performance by quickly spinning up new resources and scaling their existing infrastructure as needed without worrying about additional hardware or software investments. Additionally, AWS consulting teams will assist with migrations and optimization processes so that businesses can ensure their operations are running smoothly with minimal disruption or downtime. 

Investing in an Experienced Team 

When it comes to leveraging cloud computing platforms like AWS, organizations need to invest in an experienced team that understands both the technology as well as the business objectives of the organization. Good consultants should provide best practices while understanding the strategies that will work best for an organization’s specific needs. Organizations will increase their chances of success and ROI with the cloud when they invest in an experienced team. 

Partnering with the right experts will maximize the opportunities and services offered by AWS.

Companies can learn how to utilize AWS database services better and develop tools that meet their IT and business objectives. This can help businesses optimize their IT infrastructure while reducing capital expenditures, which will maximize profit potential. Through AWS consulting, organizations have access to cloud-based solutions that allow them to run their applications faster, scale easily and cost-effectively, increase security, provide insights into customer behavior and create innovative products. Ultimately, beyond the technical aspects, AWS consulting can help organizations achieve peak performance both operationally and financially.

Conclusion

Harnessing the power of AWS provides businesses with many benefits, including cost savings, improved performance, scalability, and flexibility. However, these benefits can only be realized if you have an experienced team guiding your transformation efforts. Investing in a qualified AWS consulting team allows organizations to take full advantage of this technology while ensuring that their operations remain secure and compliant with industry standards. Having access to experts who understand both your business objectives as well as how best to leverage this technology will give you peace of mind knowing that your transformation project is being handled correctly from start to finish.

2nd Watch employs a cloud transformation framework and methodology for every engagement guaranteeing quality, consistency, and completeness. We start by listening to identify and strike a balance between innovation, self-sufficiency, risk, and cost. We then work with you to determine where you are in your cloud journey and assemble a tailored bundle of services to meet your IT business objectives.

We have been recognized by AWS as a Premier Partner since 2012 and as an audited and approved Managed Service Provider for our outstanding customer experiences, the depth and breadth of our products and services, and our ability to scale to meet customer demand. Our engineers and architects are 100% certified on AWS, holding over 200 AWS certifications.

Contact us today to learn how 2nd Watch takes a phased approach to modernization with AWS!


Evolving Operations to Maximize AWS Cloud Native Services

As a Practice Director of Managed Cloud Services, my team and I see well-intentioned organizations fall victim to this very common scenario… Despite the business migrating from its data center to Amazon Web Services (AWS), its system operations team doesn’t make adjustments for the new environment. The team attempts to continue performing the same activities they did when their physical hardware resided in a data center or at another hosting provider.

The truth is, that modernizing your monolithic applications and infrastructure requires new skill sets, knowledge, expertise, and understanding to get desired results. Unless you’re a sophisticated, well-funded, start-up, most established organizations don’t know where to begin after the migration is complete. The transition from deploying legacy software in your own data center, to utilizing Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and micro-services, while deploying code through an automated Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, is a whole new ballgame. Not to mention how to keep it functioning after it is deployed.

In this article, I’m providing some insight on how to overcome the stagnation that hits post-migration. With forethought, AWS understanding, and a reality check on your internal capabilities, organizations can thrive with cloud-native services. At the same time, kicking issues downstream, maintaining inefficiencies, and failing to address new system requirements will compromise the ROI and assumed payoffs of modernization.

Is Your Team Prepared?

Sure, going serverless with Lambda might be all the buzz right now, but it’s not something you can effectively accomplish overnight. Running workloads on cloud-native services and platforms requires a different way of operating. New operational demands require that your internal teams are equipped with these new skill sets. Unfortunately, a team that may have mastered the old data center or dedicated hosting provider environment, may not be able to jump in on AWS.

The appeal of AWS is the great flexibility to drive your business and solve unique challenges.  However, because of the ability to provision and decommission on demand, it also introduces new complexities. If these new challenges are not addressed early on, you will definitely see friction between teams which can damage collaboration and adoption, the potential for system sprawl increases, and cost overruns can compromise the legitimacy and longevity of modernization.

Due to the high cost and small talent pool of technically efficient cloud professionals, many organizations struggle to nab the attention of these highly desired employees. Luckily, modern cloud-managed service providers can help you wade through the multitude of services AWS introduces. With a trusted and experienced partner by your side, businesses are able to gain the knowledge necessary to drive business efficiencies and solve unique challenges. Depending on the level of interaction, existing team members may be able to level up to better manage AWS growth going forward. In the meantime, involving a third-party cloud expert is a quick and efficient way to make sure post-migration change management evolves with your goals, design, timeline, and promised outcomes.

Are You Implementing DevOps?

Modern cloud operations and optimizations address the day two necessities that go into the long-term management of AWS. DevOps principles and automation need to be heavily incorporated into how the AWS environment operates. With hundreds of thousands of distinct prices and technical combinations, even the most experienced IT organizations can get overwhelmed.

Consider traditional operations management versus cloud-based DevOps. One is a physical hardware deployment that requires logging into the system to perform configurations, and then deploying software on top. It’s slow, tedious, and causes a lag for developers as they wait for feature delivery, which negatively impacts productivity. Instead of system administrators performing monthly security patching, and having to log into each instance separately, a modern cloud operation can efficiently utilize a pipeline ­with infrastructure as code. Now, you can update your configuration files to use a new image and then use infrastructure automation to redeploy. This treats each one as an ephemeral instance, minimizing any friction or delay on the developer teams.

This is just one example of how DevOps can and should be used to achieve strong availability, agility, and profitability. Measuring DevOps with the CALMS model provides a guideline for addressing the five fundamental elements of DevOps: Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing. Learn more about DevOps in our eBook, 7 Major Roadblocks in DevOps Adoption and How to Address Them.

Do You Continue With The Same Behavior?

Monitoring CPU, memory, and disk at the traditional thresholds used on legacy hardware are not necessarily appropriate when utilizing AWS EC2. To achieve the financial and performance benefits of the cloud, you purposely design systems and applications to use and pay for the number of resources required. As you increasingly deploy new cloud-native technology, such as Kubernetes and serverless operations, require that you monitor in different ways so as to reduce an abundance of unactionable alerts that eventually become noise.

For example, when running a Kubernetes cluster, you should implement monitoring that alerts on desired pods. If there’s a big difference between the number of desired pods and currently running pods, this might point to resource problems where your nodes lack the capacity to launch new pods. With a modern managed cloud service provider, cloud operations engineers receive the alert and begin investigating the cause to ensure uptime and continuity for application users. With fewer unnecessary alerts and an escalation protocol for the appropriate parties, triage of the issue can be done more quickly. In many cases remediation efforts can be automated, allowing for more efficient resource allocation.

How Are You Cutting Costs?

Many organizations initiate cloud migration and modernization to gain cost-efficiency. Of course, these financial benefits are only accessible when modern cloud operations are fully in place.

Considering that anyone can create an AWS account but not everyone has visibility or concerns for budgetary costs, it can result in costs exceeding expectations quickly. This is where establishing a strong governance model and expanding automation can help you to achieve your cost-cutting goals. You can limit instance size deployment using IAM policies to insure larger, more expensive instances are not unnecessarily utilized. Another cost that can quickly grow without the proper controls is your S3 storage. Enabling policies to have objects expire and automatically be deleted can help to curb an explosion in storage costs. Enacting policies like these to control costs requires that your organization take the time to think through the governance approach and implement it.

Evolving in the cloud can reduce computing costs by 40-60% while increasing efficiency and performance. However, those results are not guaranteed. Download our eBook, A Holistic Approach to Cloud Cost Optimization, to ensure a cost-effective cloud experience.

How Will You Start Evolving Now?

Time is of the essence when it comes to post-migration outcomes – and the board and business leaders around you will be expecting results. As your organization looks to leverage AWS cloud-native services, your development practices will become more agile and require a more modern approach to managing the environment. To keep up with these business drivers, you need a team to serve as your foundation for evolution.

2nd Watch works alongside organizations to help start or accelerate your cloud journey to become fully cloud native on AWS. With more than 10 years of migrating, operating, and effectively managing workloads on AWS, 2nd Watch can help your operations staff evolve to operate in a modern way with significant goal achievement. Are you ready for the next step in your cloud journey? Contact us and let’s get started.

 


Overcoming The Great Resignation with Managed Cloud Services

The “Great Resignation” was coined during the pandemic to define the trend of people choosing to leave their jobs in search of better opportunities. Also referred to as the Big Quit and the Great Reshuffle, 47 million Americans left their jobs in 2021, the most resignations on record. As of 2022, these rates continue to set records and show no signs of slowing down. For the IT industry, the Great Resignation is compounded by a much longer talent gap that has increased wage expectations in a small pool of qualified candidates.

Every time you open LinkedIn you confront messages from recruiters trying to lure you away from your current employer, or at the very least, have viewed your profile on multiple occasions. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with employees advancing their careers or finding new and better opportunities, employers are struggling to maintain business operations, budgets, and long-term growth goals. The fear of losing skilled engineering team members is something that keeps CTOs up at night.

Of course, every business would love a bottomless budget to entice capable technicians to both join the company, and stay there, but that’s not typically the case. In this article, I’m introducing the alternative solution of Managed Cloud Services (MCS). By partnering with trusted and experienced cloud experts, organizations can utilize their skills and services a la carte, without facing the costs of a full-time employee. Keep reading to see how MCS can be used to alleviate long-term shortages and help companies grow from the inside out.

Keeping Up with the Digital Transformation

Public cloud vendors seem to come up with a new service, feature, or enhancement every 16.47 seconds, and maintaining a team to keep up with everything is an ongoing struggle by itself. Now factor in employee turnover. Just when you have fully trained your team and they are humming along, operating like a well-oiled machine, a few decide to leave, and your productivity comes to a screeching halt. Immediately, you must create job requisitions, schedule interviews, and negotiate salaries. That alone can be quite a feat with the talent gap in IT creating high competition for qualified candidates.

At the end of 2021, Gartner named talent shortages as the biggest barrier to emerging technologies adoption. So not only is it hard to find good team members, but if you’re unable to attract the professionals required for business achievement, it could cost you in the market. As your competitors move ahead at an accelerated speed thanks to the automation and innovation of today’s technology, your business could be on a downward trajectory in comparison.

Hiring is One Thing; Maintaining Employees is Another

Once a company can hire the right employee, they must provide training and impart knowledge share to bring them up to speed to fulfill their responsibilities successfully. This process requires existing team members to stop what they’re doing and provide the training required. That slows productivity, costs resources, and distracts techs from larger business goals. Unfortunately, what happens all too often is, that as soon as the new team is back up to full productivity, someone else decides to leave. The process repeats itself in a never-ending cycle of rinse and repeat.

When a resignation occurs, not only is there a significant loss of knowledge, especially if an employee has been with the company for a substantial amount of time but cost structure can be severely affected. Turnover is unpredictable and sometimes inevitable if the business is unable or unwilling to provide the salary, benefits, environment, etc. desired by your talent pool. Without the ability to properly forecast the costs of hiring, turnover can compromise your business objectives quickly.

The highly skilled cloud engineers’ business wants and needs are hard to come by in general, and maintaining a team of them only compounds the issue. In addition to labor costs, businesses also must consider tooling expenses for things like monitoring, patching, ticketing, alerting, code repositories, security, databases, and the list goes on and on. If you’re feeling inundated with these concerns, know that you’re not alone, and there is a way off the hamster wheel.

Do These Issues Sound Familiar?

  • We’re paying a fortune for cloud engineers and developers who are constantly troubleshooting and fixing issues with the cloud itself. We need them to be able to focus on developing applications that will drive our business forward.
  • We had a middle of the night outage that went unnoticed, shut our business down for several hours, and we lost hundreds of thousands of dollars – all because we didn’t realize we were down until the next morning.
  • Our only database administrator just left for another opportunity, and we have no one to administer our database.
  • We’ve been modernizing our cloud deployment and greatly increasing our application performance by moving into containers, serverless, and CI/CD pipeline deployment. Our main DevOps engineer just left, and our Windows/Linux admins don’t have the right skill set to operate our constant code deployment.
  • A malicious hacker was able to breach our security with a DDoS attack that brought down our main revenue-generating website without us knowing.
  • My lead cloud engineer just left for another company, and I have no idea what Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 even mean, let alone how to create an AWS account, what am I going to do?

Managed Cloud Services: The “Employee” You’ve Been Searching For

Managed Cloud Services (MCS) can alleviate many of these concerns and allow your team to focus on what is most important – running your business. No matter where you are in your cloud journey, a MCS provider monitors and maintains your environment to relieve IT teams from day-to-day cloud operations. If you are utilizing more traditional services, like infrastructure as a service (IaaS), experienced MCS providers can take over the burden of “day 2” operations – including monitoring, patching, security, database administration, reporting, monolith applications, and remediation. If your environment utilizes advanced features, such as serverless, containers, and infrastructure as code, and operates in more of a DevOps type of model, MCS can cover that as well.

Not only are these daily tasks taken off your plate, but by outsourcing your cloud management to an MCS provider, they take on the responsibility of ensuring resource availability. Now, instead of your company carrying the cost of finding, attracting, negotiating, hiring, training, and maintaining all of these employees – much of it is done for you. Learn more about how MCS can help your organization stay competitive in, Managed Cloud Services: Optimize, Reduce Costs, and Efficiently Achieve Your Business Goals.

Day 2 IT Operations and Beyond with 2nd Watch

2nd Watch provides a variety of MCS with dedicated and designated resources that partner directly with businesses to not only understand your cloud environment but to understand your business requirements as well. We operate your managed services using a holistic approach to cloud management leveraging both cloud native technology and architectures as well as best in breed customized management tools. 2nd Watch partners get a 24/7 year-round service delivery manager and committed engineering team to work collaboratively for goal achievement. We have found this comprehensive method, combined with intense knowledge sharing during employee onboarding, provides a seamless experience for our managed clients. If resignation and turnover are obstacles to achieving your business outcomes, see how 2nd Watch service offerings can help. Contact us to take the next step in your cloud journey.

-By Jeff Collins | Solutions Management, Managed Cloud Services


Innovation Scoring from 2nd Watch Boosts Cloud Optimization

Does this sound familiar? “You will move to the cloud, for right or wrong, because of a business imperative to get out of your data center, not tomorrow, but yesterday.” Or, “You’re sold on the idea that by migrating to the cloud, you’d be able to reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO), increase flexibility, and accelerate innovation projects.” The cloud practically sells itself, and as a result, you plan to ditch your legacy, on-premises technology and begin your cloud migration journey.

However, suppose you hop into the cloud without a defined strategy and approach. In that case, you’ll experience cloud sprawl, and spiraling cloud costs will negate the touted benefits of the cloud. This sort of “blind faith” in all the cloud offers is a common mistake many business leaders make. It has prevented you from considering cloud management and economics as part of your cloud migration strategy.  

Without cloud cost governance, your organization will suffer O2: Overprovisioning and Overspending. You’re left confused because this is the exact opposite result you thought cloud migration would have. Additionally, if you find yourself in this predicament, you have difficulty pinpointing areas for improvement to initiate corrective action. 

Enter Innovation Scoring by 2nd Watch. Our data-driven scoring system will help you assess your applications running in the cloud environment and identify where you are overprovisioning and overspending. Innovation Scoring is the first step to establishing cloud economics and maximizing the value of cloud computing to your business in the long run.

 

The Importance of Cloud Economics

If O2 is how you define your cloud environment, you’ve learned the hard way about the need for cloud economics. While cost savings is a component of cloud economics, the ultimate goal of the practice is to maximize the value of cloud computing for your organization. Implementing cloud economics will give your business insights into which departments are utilizing the cloud, what applications and workloads are using the cloud, and how these moving parts contribute to more impactful and cost effective business goals. 

Without cloud economics, your business will deal with overrun cloud budgets, which are usually due to one or more of the following:

  • Ungoverned costs: your organization has no idea what it is spending on.
  • Unforecasted usage: you see more cloud projects than you had anticipated.
  • Uncommitted mindset: you don’t want to commit to a cloud contract (because you can’t predict its usage), so you miss out on contractual discounts.
  • Wasted dev/test resources: your dev team is overprovisioning their infrastructure.
  • Overestimated production headroom: you are not auto-scaling or have not set proper parameters for autoscaling for your applications.
  • Wrongsized production: your production environment is overprovisioned, and pay for the excess resources monthly. 
  • Poor design and implementation: your architects make suboptimal design choices for cloud solutions because they are unaware of the costs to the business. 

For cloud economics to work, there must be a company-wide commitment to the practice beyond simply calculating cloud costs. Just like implementing a DevOps practice, impactful cloud economics requires promoting a cross-functional and collaborative culture. Business leaders must encourage transparency and trackability to enable teams to work together harmoniously to manage their cloud infrastructure and prove the true business benefits of the cloud. 

 

2nd Watch’s Innovation Scoring

Cloud economics is critical for your business to reap the maximum benefits of cloud computing. However, cloud economics is a pervasive cultural practice, so it won’t happen at the snap of your fingers. It will require time and effort for your business to establish cloud economics. 

The first step in controlling your cloud budget and governing your cloud platform is to identify areas of improvement. 2nd Watch created the Innovation Scoring system, our proprietary scoring methodology, to help you identify opportunities for optimization and modernization in a data-driven way. 

Our Innovation Scoring methodology will reveal the underlying problem with your cloud management. We’ll be able to identify the application needing improvement and determine why it is suboptimal. Did you set it up incorrectly and need to move to PaaS with autoscaling capabilities? Or did someone write your application in 2005, and you are in dire need of application modernization? Or is it a combination of both? 2nd Watch designed its Innovation Scoring to pinpoint areas for improvement in your database, infrastructure, and/or application. When we ascertain the source of inefficiency, we can address issues contributing to cloud sprawl and skyrocketing cloud costs. 

To calculate your Innovation Score, we analyze several different dynamics related to your cloud applications. The ratings from each category are then cross-tabulated to generate a total view of your entire cloud environment. Your Innovation Score will not only reveal inefficiencies but also allow us to compare your efforts against other similarly sized companies and make sure you are up to industry standards. 

2nd Watch understands that cloud economics is a cultural undertaking; therefore, when we assign Innovation Scores to our clients, we do so in a way that encourages company-wide participation. To promote engagement and commitment, we’ve gamified our Innovation Scoring: we split our clients’ technical leadership into teams and calculate each team’s score. When we check in with our clients, we reveal each team’s score to showcase which ones are being innovative and taking advantage of the cloud and which ones have room for improvement. 

 

Sample Innovation Scoring Output

 

Our approach to Innovation Scoring promotes friendly competition, which fosters collaboration between teams and a transparent high-level overview of how each team is leveraging the cloud. When our clients are a part of our Innovation Scoring system, it jumpstarts a culture of innovation, transparency, and accountability within their business. 

 

Conclusion

Consider the importance of cloud economics when planning to run your applications in a cloud environment. It is easy to overspend, get overwhelmed, and have no sense of direction. Therefore, cloud economics is beneficial whether you implement it proactively or reactively.

2nd Watch’s Innovation Scoring is a practical first step to getting your cloud budget in order and establishing cloud economics as a standard cultural practice in your organization. Through data and analysis, our Innovation Scoring will help you identify how you can optimize your cloud instance so that you are receiving maximum cloud value for your business. Moreover, Innovation Scoring trains your teams to be communicative and cross-collaborative, which are the traits your company culture needs to succeed in cloud economics.

2nd Watch takes a holistic approach to cloud cost optimization and cloud economics. Contact us, and we’ll show you where and how you can improve your cloud-based applications with our Innovation Scoring.


Top 4 Data Management Solutions for Snowflake Success

The Data Insights practice at 2nd Watch saw the potential of Snowflake from the time it was a tech-unicorn in 2015. Its innovative approach to storing and aggregating data is a game-changer in the industry! On top of that, Snowflake’s value proposition to their customers complements the data management expertise that 2nd Watch has been developing since its inception. Whether you’re a mid-sized insurance carrier or a Fortune 500 manufacturer, Snowflake and 2nd Watch know how to build scalable, tailored solutions for your business problems.

On top of skills in AI and machine learning, app development, and data visualization, here are the top four data engineering services 2nd Watch uses to deploy a successful cloud data platform initiative using a tool like the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Data Warehousing 

Snowflake offers powerful features in the data warehousing space that allow 2nd Watch delivery teams to stay laser-focused on business outcomes. They use innovative technologies that optimize your data for storage, movement, and active use (cloud computing). They also have an ever-increasing array of valuable tools that significantly improve an organization’s ability to enrich and share large amounts of data with other companies. 

But it doesn’t happen by magic…

2nd Watch can leverage our vast industry and technical experience to create a data warehouse for your organization that provides a fast, accurate, and consistent view of your data from multiple sources. Using best practices and well-established methodologies, 2nd Watch combines data from different sources into a centralized repository, creating a single version of the truth and a unified view.

The final design contains a user-friendly enterprise data warehouse that connects with both legacy and modern business intelligence tools to help you analyze data across your organization. The data warehouse is optimized for performance, scaling, and ease-of-use by downstream applications.

Potential Deliverables

  • Conceptual and physical data models for dimensional and analytical systems
  • Deployment of three semantic layers for tracking data in a central hub (raw, business using data vault, and data warehouse optimized for visualizations)
  • Design and development of departmental data marts of curated data
  • Training of end users for the cloud-based data solution and critical data applications and tools

Data Integration 

Snowflake has a lot of flexibility when it comes to the data integration process, meaning Snowflake’s Data Cloud allows companies to go beyond traditional extract, transform, and load data flows. With the Snowflake ecosystem, companies can leverage data integration solutions that do everything from data preparation, migration, movement, and management, all in an automated and scalable way.

The consultants at 2nd Watch will partner with you every step of the way and guide the entire team in the right direction to meet your decision-makers’ specific goals and your organization’s business data needs. These are some of the popular data integration tools and technologies that 2nd Watch can help integrate to Snowflake:

  • Azure Data Factory
  • AWS Glue and Lambda
  • Google Cloud Data Fusion
  • Fivetran/HVR
  • Etlworks 
  • IBM DataStage 
  • SnapLogic 
  • Plus, all the classics, including SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Informatica

Potential Deliverables

  • Integration of any number of sources to a centralized data hub
  • Establishment of a custom system that operates well with niche sources
  • Speeding up the ingestion process and increasing the auditing power
  • End-game integration to a data warehouse and other target systems

Data Modernization

Snowflake is a paradigm-shifting platform. Micro partition storage, decentralized compute, and cross-cloud sharing opens up new opportunities for companies to solve pain in their analytics processing. Our consultants at 2nd Watch are trained in the latest technologies and have the technical expertise to tackle the challenges posed by making your legacy systems “just work” in modern ecosystems like Snowflake.

Using supplemental tools like dbt or sqlDBM, this process will transform your data platform by eliminating complexities, reducing latency, generating documentation, integrating siloed sources, and unlocking the ability to scale and upgrade your existing data solutions.

Potential Deliverables

  • Migration to Snowflake from existing high-maintenance deployments
  • Refactoring, redesigning, and performance tuning of data architecture 
  • Deploying Snowpark API for integrating with Scala or Python applications 
  • Supporting modern tool selection and integration

Data Governance 

Data governance is critical to organizations hoping to achieve and maintain long-term success. Snowflake offers outstanding features such as object tagging or data classification that improve the security, quality, and value of the data. Additionally, when you work with 2nd Watch, we can help your organization establish a data governance council and program.

2nd Watch will assist you in identifying and coaching early adopters and champions. We will help with establishing roles and responsibilities (e.g., business owners, stewards, custodians), as well as creating and documenting principles, policies, processes, and standards. Finally, we will identify the right technology to help automate these processes and improve your data governance maturity level.

Potential Deliverables

  • Data governance strategy
  • Change management: identification of early adopters and champions
  • Master data management implementation
  • Data quality: data profiling, cleansing, and standardization
  • Data security and compliance (e.g., PII, HIPAA, GRC)

2nd Watch will make sure your team is equipped to make the most of your Snowflake ecosystem and analytics tools, guiding the entire process through deployment of a successful initiative. Get started with our Snowflake Value Accelerator.


Mind the Gap! The Leap from Legacy to Modern Applications 

Most businesses today have evaluated their options for application modernization. Planned movement to the cloud happened ahead of schedule, driven by the need for rapid scalability and agility in the wake of COVID-19.

Legacy applications already rehosted or replatformed in the cloud saw increased load, highlighting painful inefficiencies in scalability and sometimes even causing outages. Your business has likely already taken some first steps in app modernization and updating legacy systems. 

Of the seven options to modernize with legacy systems outlined by Gartner, 2nd Watch commonly works with clients who have already successfully rehosted and replatformed applications. To a lesser extent, we see mainframe applications encapsulated in a modern RESTful API or replaced altogether. Businesses frequently take those first steps in their digital transformation but find themselves stuck crossing the gap to a fully modern application. 

What are common issues and solutions businesses face as they move away from outdated technologies and progress towards fully modern applications? 

Keeping the Goal in Mind 

Overcoming the inertia to begin a modernization project is often a lengthy process, requiring several months or as much as a year or more to complete the first phases. Development teams require training, thorough and careful planning must occur, and unforeseen challenges are encountered and overcome. Through it all, the needs of the business never slow down, and the temptation to halt or dramatically slow legacy modernization efforts after the initial phases of modernization can be substantial. 

No matter what the end state of the modernization journey looks like, it can be helpful to keep it at the forefront of the development team’s minds. In today’s remote and hybrid working environment, that’s not as easy as keeping a whiteboard or poster in a room. Sprint ceremonies should include a brief reminder of long-term business goals, especially for backlog or sprint reviews. Keep the team invested in the business and technical reasons and the question “why modernize legacy applications” at the forefront of their minds. Most importantly, solicit their feedback on the process required to accomplish the long-term strategic goals of the business. 

With the goal firmly in your development team’s minds, it’s time to tackle tactics in migrating from legacy apps to newer systems. What are some of these common stumbling blocks on the road to refactoring and rearchitecting legacy software? 

(Related article: Rehost vs Refactor vs Replatform | AppMod Essentials) 

Refactoring 

Refactoring an application can encompass a broad set of areas. Refactoring is sometimes as straightforward as reducing technical debt, or it can be as complex as breaking apart a monolithic application into smaller services. In 2nd Watch’s experience, some common issues when refactoring running applications include: 

  • Limited knowledge of cloud-based architectural patterns.
    Even common architectures like 2- and 3-tier applications require some legacy code changes when an application has moved from a data center to a cloud service provider or among cloud service providers. Where an older application may have hardcoded IP addresses or DNS, a modern approach to accessing application tiers would use environment variables configured at runtime, pointing at load balancers. 
  • Lack of telemetry and observability.
    Development teams are frequently hesitant to make changes quickly because there are too many unknowns in their application. Proper monitoring of known unknowns (metrics) and unknown unknowns (observability) can demystify the impact of refactoring. For more context around the types of unknowns and how to work with them in an application, Charity Majors frequently writes on the topic. 
  • Lack of thorough automated tests.
    A lack of automated tests also slows the ability to make changes because developers cannot anticipate what their changes might break. Improved telemetry and observability can help, but automated testing is the other side of the equation. Tools like Codecov can initially help improve test coverage, but unless carefully attended, incentivizing a percentage of test coverage across the codebase can lead to tests that do not thoroughly cover all common use cases. Good unit tests and integration testing can halt problems before they even start. 
  • No blueprint for optimal refactoring.
    Without a clear blueprint for understanding what an optimally refactored app looks like, development and information technology teams can become frustrated or unclear about their end goals. Heroku’s Twelve-Factor App methodology is one commonly used framework for crafting or refactoring modern applications. It has the added benefit of being applicable to many deployment models – single- or multiple-server, containers, or serverless. 

Rearchitecting

Rearchitecting an application to leverage better capabilities, such as those found in a cloud service provider’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options, may present some challenges. The most common challenge 2nd Watch encounters with clients is not fully understanding the options available in modern environments. Older applications are the product of their time and typically were built optimally for the available technology and needs. However, when rearchitecting those applications, sometimes development teams either don’t know or don’t have details about better options that may be available. 

Running a MySQL database on the same machine as the rest of the monolithic application may have made sense when initially writing the application. Today, many applications can run more cheaply, more securely, and with the same or better performance using a combination of cloud storage buckets, managed caches like Redis or Memcached, and secrets managers. These consumption-based cloud options tend to be significantly cheaper than managed databases or databases running on cloud virtual machines. Scaling automatically with end-user demand and reduced management overhead are additional benefits of software modernization. 

Rearchitecting an application can also be frustrating for experienced systems administrators tasked with maintaining and troubleshooting production applications. For example, moving from VMs to containers introduces an entirely different way of dealing with logs. Sysadmins must forward them to a log aggregator instead of storing them on disk. Autoscaling a service can mean the difference between identifying which instances – of potentially dozens or hundreds – had an issue instead of a small handful of them. Application modernization impacts every person involved with the long-term success of that application, not just developers and end-users. 

Conclusion 

Application Modernization is a long-term strategic activity, not a short-term tactical activity. Over time, you will realize the benefits of the lower total cost of ownership (TCO), increased agility, and faster time to market. Recognizing and committing to the future of your business will help you overcome the short- and mid-term challenges of app modernization. 

Engaging a trusted partner to accelerate your app modernization journey and lead the charge across that gap is a powerful strategy to overcome some of the highlighted problems. It can be difficult to overcome a challenge with the same mindset that led to creating that challenge. An influx of different ideas and experiences can be the push development teams need to reach the next level for a business. 

If you’re wondering how to modernize legacy applications and are ready to work with a trusted advisor that can help you cross that gap, 2nd Watch will meet you wherever you are in your journey. Contact us to schedule a discussion of your goals, challenges, and how we can help you reach the end game of modern business applications. 

Michael Gray, 2nd Watch Senior Cloud Consultant 


Manufacturing Analytics: The Power of Data in the Manufacturing Industry

The effects of the pandemic have hit the manufacturing industry in ways no one could have predicted. During the last 18 months, a new term has come up frequently in the news and in conversation: the supply chain crisis. Manufacturers have been disrupted in almost every facet of their business, and they have been put to the test as to whether they can weather these challenges or not. 

 

Manufacturing businesses that began a digital transformation prior to the current global crisis have been more agile in handling the disruptions. That is because manufacturers using data analytics and cloud technology can be flexible in adopting the capabilities they need for important business goals, be able to identify inefficiencies more quickly and be equipped to adopt a hybrid workforce to make sure production doesn’t stall. 

The pandemic has identified and accelerated the need for manufacturers to digitize and harness the power of modern technology. Real-time data and analytics are fundamental to the manufacturing industry because they create the contextual awareness that is crucial for optimizing products and processes. This is especially important during the supply chain crisis, but this goes beyond the scope of the pandemic. Manufacturers will want to, despite the external circumstances, automate for quicker and smarter decisions in order to remain competitive and have a positive impact on the bottom line. 

In this article, we’ll identify the use cases and benefits of manufacturing analytics, which can be applied in any situation at any time. 

What is Manufacturing Analytics?

Manufacturing analytics is used to capture, process, and analyze machine, operational, and system data in order to manage and optimize production. It is used in critical functions – such as planning, quality, and maintenance – because it has the ability to predict future use, avoid failures, forecast maintenance requirements, and identify other areas for improvement. 

To improve efficiency and remain competitive in today’s market, manufacturing companies need to undergo a digital transformation to change the way their data is collected. Traditionally, manufacturers capture data in a fragmented manner: their staff manually check and record factors, fill forms, and note operation and maintenance histories for machines on the floor. These practices are susceptible to human error, and as a result, risk being highly inaccurate. Moreover, these manual processes are extremely time-consuming and open to biases. 

Manufacturing analytics solves these common issues. It collects data from connected devices, which reduces the need for manual data collection and, thereby, cuts down the labor associated with traditional documentation tasks. Additionally, its computational power removes the potential errors and biases that traditional methods are prone to. 

Because manufacturing equipment collects massive volumes of data via sensors and edge devices, the most efficient and effective way to process this data is to feed the data to a cloud-based manufacturing analytics platform. Without the power of cloud computing, manufacturers are generating huge amounts of data, but losing out on potential intelligence they have gathered. 

Cloud-based services provide a significant opportunity for manufacturers to maximize their data collection. The cloud provides manufacturers access to more affordable computational power and more advanced analytics. This enables manufacturing organizations to gather information from multiple sources, utilize machine learning models, and ultimately discover new methods to optimize their processes from beginning to end. 

Additionally, manufacturing analytics uses advanced models and algorithms to generate insights that are near-real-time and much more actionable. Manufacturing analytics powered by automated machine data collection unlocks powerful use cases for manufacturers that range from monitoring and diagnosis to predictive maintenance and process automation. 

Use Cases for Cloud-Based Manufacturing Analytics

The ultimate goal of cloud-based analytics is to transition from having descriptive to predictive practices. Rather than just simply collecting data, manufacturers want to be able to leverage their data in near-real-time to get ahead of issues with equipment and processes and to reduce costs. Below are some business use cases for automated manufacturing analytics and how they help enterprises achieve predictive power:

Demand Forecasting and Inventory Management

Manufacturers need to have complete control of their supply chain in order to better manage inventory. However, demand planning is complex. Manufacturing analytics makes this process simpler by providing near-real-time floor data to support supply chain control, which leads to improved purchase management, inventory control, and transportation. The data provides insight into the time and costs needed to build parts and run a given job, which gives manufacturers the power to more accurately estimate their needs for material to improve planning. 

Managing Supply Chains

For end-to-end visibility in the supply chain, data can be captured from materials in transit and sent straight from external vendor equipment to the manufacturing analytics platform. Manufacturers can then manage their supply chains from a central hub of data collection that organizes and distributes the data to all stakeholders. This enables manufacturing companies to direct and redirect resources to speed up or down. 

Price Optimization

In order to optimize pricing strategies and create accurate cost models, manufacturers need exact timelines and costs. Having an advanced manufacturing analytics platform can help manufacturers determine accurate cycle times to ensure prices are appropriately set. 

Product Development

To remain competitive, manufacturing organizations must invest in research and development (R&D) to build new product lines, improve existing models, and introduce new services. Manufacturing analytics makes it possible for this process to be simulated, rather than using traditional iterative modeling. This reduces R&D costs greatly because real-life conditions can be replicated virtually to predict performance. 

Robotization

Manufacturers are relying more on robotics. As these robots become more intelligent and independent, the data they collect while they execute their duties will increase. This valuable data can be used within a cloud-based manufacturing analytics platform to really control quality at the micro-level. 

Computer Vision Applications

Modern automated quality control harnesses advanced optical devices. These devices can collect information via temperature, optics, and other advanced vision applications (like thermal detection) to precisely control stops.

Fault Prediction and Preventative Maintenance

Using near-real-time data, manufacturers can predict the likelihood of a breakdown – and when it may happen – with confidence. This is much more effective than traditional preventive maintenance programs that are use-based or time-based. Manufacturing analytics’s accuracy to predict when and how a machine will break down allows technicians to perform optimal repairs that reduce overall downtime and increase productivity. 

Warranty Analysis

It’s important to analyze information from failed products to understand how products are withstanding the test of time. With manufacturing analytics, products can be improved or changed to reduce failure and therefore costs. Collecting warranty data can also shed light on the use (and misuse) of products, increase product safety, improve repair procedures, reduce repair times, and improve warranty service. 

Benefits of Manufacturing Analytics

In short, cloud-based manufacturing analytics provides awareness and learnings on a near-real-time basis. For manufacturers to be competitive, contextual awareness is crucial for optimizing product development, quality, and costs. Production equipment generates huge volumes of data, and manufacturing analytics allows manufacturers to leverage this data stream to improve productivity and profitability. Here are the tangible benefits and results of implementing manufacturing analytics:

Full Transparency and Understanding of the Supply Chain

In today’s environment, owning the supply chain has never been more critical. Data analytics can help mitigate the challenges that have cropped up with the current supply chain crisis. For manufacturing businesses, this means having the right number of resources. Data analytics allows manufacturers to remain as lean as possible, which is especially important in today’s global climate. Organizations need to use data analytics to ensure they have the right amount of material and optimize their supply chains during a time when resources are scarce and things are uncertain. 

Reduced Costs

Manufacturing analytics reveals insights that can be used to optimize processes, which leads to cost savings. Predictive maintenance programs decrease downtime and manage parts inventories more intelligently, limiting costs and increasing productivity. Robotics and machine learning reduce labor and the associated costs. 

Increased Revenue

Manufacturers must be dynamic in responding to demand fluctuations. Near-real-time manufacturing analytics allows companies to be responsive to ever-changing demands. At any given time, manufacturing companies have up-to-date insights into inventory, product, and supply chains, allowing them to adjust to demand accordingly in order to maintain delivery times. 

Improved Efficiency Across the Board

The amount of information that product equipment collects enables manufacturers to increase efficiency in a variety of ways. This includes reducing energy consumption, mitigating compliance errors, and controlling the supply chain. 

Greater Customer Satisfaction

At the end of the day, it is important to know what customers want. Data analytics is a crucial tool in collecting data from customer feedback, which can be applied to streamlining the process per the customer’s requirements. Manufacturers can analyze the data collected to determine how to personalize services for their consumers, thereby, increasing customer satisfaction. 

Conclusion

The effects of COVID-19 have shaken up the manufacturing industry. Because of the pandemic’s disruptions, manufacturers are realizing the importance of robust tools – like cloud computing and data analytics – to remain agile, lean, and flexible regardless of external challenges. The benefits that organizations can reap from these technologies go far beyond the horizon of the current supply chain crisis. Leading manufacturers are using data from systems across the organization to increase efficiency, drive innovation, and improve overall performance in any environment.

2nd Watch’s experience managing and optimizing data means we understand industry-specific data and systems. Our manufacturing data analytics solutions and consultants can assist you in building and implementing a strategy that will help your organization modernize, innovate, and outperform the competition. Learn more about our manufacturing solutions and how we can help you gain deep insight into your manufacturing data!


How to Choose the Best Cloud Service Provider for your Application Modernization Strategy

If the global pandemic taught us anything, it’s that digital transformation is a must-have for businesses to keep up with customer demands and remain competitive. To do this, organizations are moving their workloads to and modernizing their applications for the cloud faster than ever.

In fact, according to a recent survey, 91% of respondents agree or strongly agree that application modernization plays a critical role in their organization’s adaptability to rapidly changing business conditions. But there are so many cloud service providers to choose from! How do you know which one is best for your application modernization objectives? Keep reading to find out!  

What is a Cloud Services Provider (CSP)? 

A cloud services provider is a cloud computing company that provides public clouds, managed private clouds, or on-demand cloud infrastructures, platforms, and services. Many CSPs are available worldwide, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. However, three industry giants are noteworthy because of their services and global footprint: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. 

What is Application Modernization? 

Application modernization is the process of revamping an application to take advantage of breakthrough technical innovations to improve the overall efficiency of the application remarkably. This efficiency typically involves high availability, increased fault tolerance, high scalability, improved security, eliminating a single point of failure, disaster recovery, contemporary and simplified tools, new coding language, and reduced resource requirements, among other benefits. Many companies running legacy applications are now looking at how they can best modernize their monolith applications. 

Application Rationalization: The First Step to Modernization 

The best way to start any application modernization journey is with application rationalization. In this process, you identify company-wide business applications and strategically determine which ones you should keep, replace, retire, or consolidate. Once you identify those applications, you can list each one’s ease or difficulty level, total cost of ownership (TCO), and business value, enabling you to decide and prioritize which action to take. (Hint: Start with high value and minimal effort apps!) Doing this will also help you eliminate redundancies, lower costs, and maximize efficiency. 

The high-value apps that are difficult to move to the cloud will likely cause the most grief in your decision-making process. But, like Rome, your modernization strategy doesn’t need to be built in a day.

You can develop an approach to application modernization over time and still reduce costs and risks while moving your portfolio forward.  

It is crucial to evaluate your current application stack and determine the most suitable application modernization strategy to migrate to the cloud when it comes to application modernization in the cloud. Many on-premises applications are legacy monoliths that may benefit more from refactoring than a rehosting (“lift and shift”) approach. (Check out Rehost, Refactor, Replatform – What, When, & Why? | AppMod Essentials) 

Refactoring may require overhauling your application code, which takes some high-level effort but offers the most benefits. However, not all applications are ideal candidates for refactoring. Rearchitecting will become necessary for some obsolete applications that are not compatible with the cloud due to architectural designs made while building the app. In this scenario, the value proposition considers rearchitecting, dividing the application into several functional components that can be individually adapted and further developed. These small, independent pieces—or “microservices”—can then be migrated to the cloud quickly and efficiently. 

Determining the Best Cloud Services Provider for Your Application Modernization 

Each application modernization journey is unique, as is the process of choosing the best cloud service provider that meets your demands. What works for one business’ application may not be the best for yours, even if they are in the same industry. And just because a competitor has chosen one CSP over another does not mean you should. 

When evaluating the CSP that is best for you, consider the following: 

Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Determine if the CSP’s service level agreements suit your production workloads, whether the cloud service is generally available yet, and they retain satisfactory levels of support knowledge. Managing workloads in the cloud can sometimes be tedious. The managed services department may not have the required expertise to efficiently manage and monitor the cloud environment. It is critical to your business to do your due diligence to ensure your preferred CSP can administer their managed offerings with as close to zero downtime as possible. 

  • Vendor Lock-in: It is important to have alternatives to any single CSP and that you retain the flexibility to substitute for a better value proposition. 
  • Enterprise Adoption: Consider the likelihood of scalability of your use of the CSP across your organization. 
  • Economic Impact: Consider the positive business or financial impacts that result from the service usage at the individual, department, and company-wide levels. 
  • Automation and Deployment: Verify the CSP’s integration capabilities with your organization’s preferred automation tooling and availability of automated and local testing frameworks.  

CSP Application Modernization Design Considerations 

When modernizing existing applications to take the best advantage of the cloud, cloud technologies like serverless and containers are good options to consider. Serverless computing and containers are cloud-native tools that automate code deployment into isolated environments. Developers can build highly scalable applications with fewer resources within a short time. They both also reduce overhead for cloud-hosted web applications but differ in many ways. Private cloud, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud approaches to application modernization are worth considering too. 

Serverless Computing and Containers 

Serverless computing is an exaction model where the CSP executes a piece of code by dynamically allocating the resources and can only charge for the services used to run the code. Code is typically run in stateless containers. Various events such as HTTP requests, monitoring alerts, database events, queuing services, file uploads, scheduled events (cron jobs), and more can trigger them.

 

The cloud service provider then receives the code in a function to execute, which is why serverless computing is sometimes referred to as a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform. Add that to your list of as-a-Service acronyms: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS!   

The FaaS offerings of the three major CSPs are: 

Containers provide a discrete environment set up within an operating system. They can run one or more applications, typically assigned only those resources necessary for the application to function correctly. Because containers are smaller and faster than virtual machines, they allow applications to run quickly and reliably among various computing environments. Container images become containers at runtime and include everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and settings. 

Private, Hybrid, and Multi-Cloud 

The public cloud is a vital part of any modernization strategy. However, some organizations may not be ready to go directly to the public cloud from the datacenter. Cloud architects should consider private, hybrid, and multi-cloud strategies in those cases. These models can help resolve any architectural, security, or latency concerns. They will also reduce the complexity associated with the policies for specific workloads based on their unique characteristics.  

Conclusion 

Migration to the cloud is ideal for investing in application modernization as it can lower your overall operational costs and increase your application’s resiliency. But not all use cases—nor cloud service providers—are the same. You need to do your homework before choosing the best-suited one for your business.  

2nd Watch offers a comprehensive consulting methodology and proven tools to accelerate your cloud-native and app modernization objectives. Our modernization process begins with a complete assessment of your existing application portfolio to identify which you should keep, replace, retire, or consolidate. We then develop and implement a modernization strategy that best meets your business needs.

From application rationalization to application modernization and beyond, 2nd Watch is your go-to trusted advisor throughout your entire modernization journey. 

Contact us to schedule a brief meeting with our specialists to discuss your current modernization objectives. 

By Alex Ifebigh, 2nd Watch Sr. Cloud Consultant